By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

The Things They Carried (ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) - ISBN: 9780547420295